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seanhunter 7 days ago

There's a nice presentation of the paper here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QjgvbvFoQA

In essence the effect comes from "precession" - the tendency of the flip to not be purely vertical but to have some wobble/angular momentum which causes it to flip in such a way as to spend longer on one side than the other. Depending on the technique this will have a greater or lesser effect on the fairness of the coin toss, ranging from about p_same = 0.508 for the best technique to one person in the study actually exhibiting 0.6 over a large sample which is staggeringly unlikely if the toss was purely fair. In the extreme, it shows in the video a magician doing a trick toss using precession that looks as if it's flipping but does not in fact change sides at all, purely rotating in the plane of the coin and wobbling a bit.

The video is quite a nice one for setting out how hypothesis testing works.

yread 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

link to the "wobble flip" trick https://youtu.be/-QjgvbvFoQA?t=325

pinko 7 days ago | parent [-]

I think you accidentally linked to the same video as the parent comment...

I bet this is the video you mean? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-L7KOjyDrE

swores 7 days ago | parent [-]

They linked to the same video, but to a specific timestamp within it - by adding '?t=325' to the URL, which tells Youtube to play the video from 5m25s rather than from the beginning.

Vecr 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Ah man, please use Bayesian statistics there... Well, the presenter says he doesn't know much about statistics.

seanhunter 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

The paper does use Bayesian statistics. Presenter is a pure maths PhD.

Vecr 6 days ago | parent [-]

I don't think I was clear, but I was only talking about the presenter's attempted explanation of the statistics of this problem.

drcwpl 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This can be really relevant in various fields, statistics, gambling, and decision-making. I like the fact that they imply the importance of considering potential biases in seemingly random events.